“—gave me membership in a club. Even if that club decided to turn on me or use me as a scapegoat. I don’t know if I even qualify now. Egg is kind of freaked out. I spent so long wrestling with this demon that was my body… I kind of didn’t realize that all I was inside my body, inside my head, my identity, it was more demons.”

“Can you befriend your demons?” I asked. “Tame it—them?”

“I think I’ve vanquished too many of them. Or left them behind. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Mind letting go of me? I won’t let you fall. Just…” I pulled back a bit as she unwrapped herself from me, making sure she had her feet on the sturdiest branches, while I held her arms. “Balance.”

“What’s up?” she asked. “Going to leave me up a tree?”

“No. I wanted to face you properly,” I told her. “Sveta Karelia. That’s you. It’s a name you can go by because it’s a name you chose yourself.”

“I wasn’t really gunning for a pep talk,” she said.

“This isn’t. This is a friend-to-friend talk,” I said, looking her in the eyes. They were a bit red. “Sveta Karelia, you are, above all else, colorful, inside and out.”

I fixed her coat with its large sections done up in different colored patches, some triangular, some in other geometric shapes, tugging at the front to pull it tighter around her body.

“You’re an artist to the point it overflows. Your whiteboard in the headquarters, your skin, your clothes and your costume. Every notebook that sits within your reach, including my notebooks I was using for my university lectures in the hospital.”

“I was bored. I liked the company but I was bored,” she said. But she smiled fondly as she said it.

“You have a sense of injustice, Sveta. You feel a genuine outrage when the weak are bullied and when wrongs are done. I think it’s what makes you a good hero. And you are a good hero. You saved Armstrong. You gave your all against Mr. Hugs or whatever asinine name it was Chicken Little gave him. You stopped Saint.”

“Saying it’s a sense of injustice feels kinda off.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” I told her. “You have a softer side. A gentleness around animals and kids, genuine caring. I well and truly believe that if the world had more Svetas in it, it would be a better place.”

She averted her eyes.

“Identify them. Name them. Those parts of yourself,” I told her. “Mosaic, Painter, Justicar—”

Sveta snorted.

“Caretaker. You can even name the side that has to carry the anger you feel toward Cauldron if it gives you more power over it.”